There are no easy or inexpensive solutions to increasing wireless capacity. Like Moore’s Law in semiconductors, Wireless has its own rule of thumb governing the number of bits that can be transmitted over a given amount of wireless spectrum. Mobile phone pioneer Martin Cooper has posited that the number of “conversations” that can be simultaneously transmitted over a given unit of spectrum has roughly doubled every 30 months since Marconi’s first trans-Atlantic transmission in 1895. This means that spectral efficiency has improved by over a million times every 50 years.
